Warren: A well-off voice for the poor

Elizabeth Warren may have embraced the Occupy Wall Street movement and the “99 percent” crowd, but public records reveal the liberal firebrand belongs to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.

Her financial well-being will likely hand conservatives a new line of attack against the consumer advocate and Democratic Senate hopeful in Massachusetts who has fired up the left and was labeled by one columnist as “the first candidate of the Occupy Wall Street movement.”

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“I don’t begrudge her own personal wealth. I begrudge her hypocrisy of trying to play the demagogue against those who have achieved and who have created wealth,” said Rick Manning of the conservative group Americans for Limited Government.

Warren earned nearly $535,000 in 2009, including $310,000 for teaching law at Harvard University, according to financial disclosure reports she had to file as a political appointee of President Barack Obama.

She took home $507,000 in 2010. Neither of those figures included the salary of her husband, fellow Harvard law professor Bruce Mann, or the $192,722 Warren earned between 2009 and 2010 for chairing the congressional panel tasked with overseeing the bank bailouts. The totals also did not include the roughly $138,000 she earned between September 2010 and July 2011 while launching the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to separate salary records obtained by POLITICO.

The Cambridge couple reported at least $4.6 million in financial investments and property.

Warren’s executive-branch financial reports, which the Treasury Department provided in response to a POLITICO public records request, paint perhaps the most current and complete picture of her financial portfolio. As a Senate candidate, Warren had been required to file financial disclosure reports with the Senate ethics committee by an Oct. 15 deadline, but the panel granted her request for an extension until Jan. 13, 2012.

Though she’s no billionaire, Warren’s earnings put her among the highest income earners in the country. In 2009, those who made at least $343,927 a year fell within the top 1 percent of income earners, according to the Internal Revenue Service.

By comparison, freshman Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), whose seat Warren is targeting next year, pulled in $157,254 in 2009 before his election, about half from his salary as a state senator. His income rose dramatically in 2010 after receiving a $700,000 book advance from HarperCollins Publishers for his autobiography, “Against All Odds: My Life of Hardship, Fast Breaks and Second Chances.”

Warren backers note that some of the richest members of Congress have often been the most outspoken advocates for the poor and middle class, including the late liberal Sen. Ted Kennedy, whose seat Warren is seeking to reclaim for Democrats after Brown won it in a 2010 upset.

Unlike Kennedy though, Warren wasn’t always well-off. Born to middle-class parents in Oklahoma City, Warren got her first taste of economic hardship at the age of 12, when her father had a heart attack and had his pay cut, according to her campaign biography. After college, Warren taught elementary school and later put herself through law school while a young mother.

“Elizabeth came up the hard way and knows the struggles that families face because she lived them ,” said her spokesman, Kyle Sullivan.

“Her life’s work has centered on listening to people, understanding the economic pressures holding them back and pulling them under,” Sullivan added. “And from that understanding, she has taken on Wall Street and the big banks to make a difference in the lives of middle-class families.”

While organizers of the Occupy movement say they don’t fault Warren for her personal wealth, they doubt she’ll be much different than other politicians if she returns to Washington.